Olivia looks down at her bandaged hand, remembering her cousin’s rage when she first cut herself. The way her skin split open as she pounded on the door, desperate to get free. Matthew’s bleeding palm as he pressed it to the iron and sealed it shut again.
He guides the model on its arc until the two houses face one another. As they come to rest, the metal rings align between them.
“It is still there, the thing beyond the wall, still trying to get out. It’s fighting now, harder than ever, not because it’s strong, but because it’s weak. It’s running out of time. Out of us. There must always be a Prior at the gate. That is what my father said. And his father, and his, and his. But they were wrong.”
Matthew lifts his head, and there is a defiant gleam in the dark of his eyes.
“It will not end until there are no Priors left. Don’t you see? Anyone can guard the wall. Mend the cracks. Keep it standing. But we are the keys to that prison. Only our blood can open the door, and that thing in the dark will do anything to get it from us. It will torture us, turn every dream to nightmare, bend our minds until we break or—”
He grits his teeth, and she sees his father on his knees in the grass, the gun lifting to his temple.
“As long as there is a Prior in this house, it has a chance. That is why you should never have come. It is strongest here, beside the wall. If you go far enough, perhaps it will not find you.”
Olivia swallows. Could that be true? No, it is a chance, perhaps, but not a promise. Her mother left, and still the darkness found her. And she is a Prior after all. Matthew may want to be the last, but he is not alone.
She shakes her head.
Matthew’s fist hits the table, the force sending the metal rings back into motion.
“You have to go!” he shouts, but she doesn’t. She won’t.
He folds forward, lank curls shadowing his face, and she sees something drip onto the desk. Tears. “It cannot be for nothing,” he says, throat tight. “I am so tired. I can’t—” His voice breaks.
Olivia goes to her cousin, reaches out a cautious hand, expecting him to pull away. But he doesn’t. Something in him breaks, and then the words spill out.
“It took my brother first.”
Olivia pulls her hand back as if burned.
“It was two years ago,” he says. “The darkness had never come for children. It always went for the older Priors. It was easier to get inside their heads. But it didn’t come for my father. It didn’t come for me. It came for Thomas. It drew him barefoot out of bed one night.”
That is why they strap him down, she thinks. That is why his wrists are bruised and his eyes are dark.
“He was still asleep when it led him through the house and across the garden and around the wall. He was only twelve.”
Her mind spins as she thinks of the boy she saw on the other side, the one curled at the bottom of the fountain. How old was he? His hair and skin looked faded, gray, but perhaps it was only a trick of the light, perhaps—
“I went after him, of course,” says Matthew. “I had to. He’d always been afraid of the dark.” His voice wavers, almost breaks. But he presses on. “My father wanted to go, but I said it should be me. I told him I was stronger, but the truth is, I simply couldn’t bear the thought of losing them both.” The breath catches in his throat. “So I went. And I saw the house beyond the wall. But I never went in. I didn’t have to. The door on the other side was soaked with blood. There was so much of it. Too much. Someone had painted the door with my brother’s life. Covered every iron inch.” He tugs at the bandage on his palm.
“But that thing slaughtered my brother for nothing. Only a Prior’s blood can open the door, but it has to be willingly given. Now it knows, and every night, I dream that he is still alive, still there on the other side of that godforsaken wall, calling out, pleading to be rescued and—what are you doing?”
Olivia has rounded the desk. She pushes him aside and pulls open the drawer, searching for a pen, even though she knows there isn’t one, nothing but the little black book filled with places she might be. She pushes off the desk and plunges past Matthew out of the study and into the hall, hurrying toward the foyer, to her suitcase, because she knows, she knows, that she has seen him.
She kneels and throws it open, dragging out her sketchbook and her pencil. Doesn’t even bother standing, just crouches there on the foyer’s patterned floor and starts to draw.
Matthew’s footsteps sound nearby, and then he’s there, bracing himself against the banister as her pencil hisses over parchment, carving out a scene.
A boy, lying at the bottom of an empty fountain, bound to the feet of a broken statue. Folded in as if sleeping, his face half-hidden by curls.
She shoves the sketchpad into Matthew’s hand, tapping it with the butt of the pencil.
“I don’t understand,” he says, looking from the paper to her and back. “What is this? Where did you . . .”
Olivia lets out an exasperated breath, wishing people would stop and think sometimes, fill in the words so she doesn’t have to. She takes the sketchpad from him and turns back to the drawing she did of the wall. And it seems impossible for Matthew to get paler, but he does.
And then he grabs her wrist and pulls her up the stairs and down the hall, to the room she has only seen once, in the dead of night, when the screams drew her to the door. His bed is made now, the covers smoothed, his nightmares erased, at least from the sheets. But the cuffs peek out from under the bed, and he absently rubs one wrist, the bruises still bright against his too-pale skin.
Matthew goes to the far wall, the shape propped against it, covered by a white sheet. He pulls it back, revealing a picture frame. A family portrait.
The one missing from the downstairs hall. In it, her uncle stands in the garden, stern-faced but human and whole, one arm wrapped around his wife, Isabelle, holding her close. And there, before them, a pair of boys seated on a stone bench. Matthew, thirteen maybe, already long and lean, tawny hair swept half across his face. And a smaller boy, looking up at him with adoration.
“Is that who you saw?” asks Matthew, his words tight and small, as if they’re caught inside his chest.
Olivia sinks to her knees before the portrait, studying Thomas Prior, laying this image over the one in her mind. He is younger than the boy she found in the fountain, but not by much. Here his eyes are bright and wide, there they were closed; here his curls look light brown instead of gray. But everything is gray beyond the wall. And there is no denying the slope of his cheek. The line of his nose. The angle of his chin.
“Is that him?” presses Matthew.
Olivia swallows and nods, and her cousin folds into the nearest chair, his bandaged hand pressed to his mouth.
“It’s been two years,” he says, and she doesn’t know if he’s thinking that the boy in the fountain can’t be his brother, or about how long he left him there. How long he thought him dead.
All the movement in the halls has drawn Hannah. She stands in the doorway, uncertain.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
Matthew looks up. “It’s Thomas,” he says, eyes bright with fear and hope. “He’s still alive.”
Chapter Twenty-Three